We were at QCon SF 2014

QCon is one of the most identifiable conferences in IT world. Several times every year it connects IT professionals
from the whole world in such a well-known locations like San Francisco, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing or London.
The main idea of conference is to facilitate the spread of knowledge and innovation in developer community.

Facts

QCon SF 2014 was held in San Francisco at Hyatt Regency hotel. The conference itself took 3 days
(November 3rd – November 17th), there were also additional two days of tutorials. Each conference day was opened
with a keynote – the only part (except lunches and social events) when all attendees were together in one place.
Then five separate tracks were launched, each one covering a specific topic from a wide range of IT issues.
There was also an additional track of sponsored solutions. Some of the most interesting themes were:
Deploying at Scale,
Scalable Microservice Architectures,
Java at the Cutting Edge,
Reactive Service Architecture,
Real World Functional or
the Future of Mobile. As you can see, differentiated topics were provided and
whether you are a programmer, team leader or architect – you could surely find one that fit your interests.

Conference days, full of valuable talks, were interspersed with social events like lunches in hotel foyer, dinner
at a brewery where we tasted local beers and fine Spanish cuisine. Two hospitality receptions with snacks and
drinks were also held at conference venue.

Slides and videos from the conference are available at QCon website. For now some stuff has been shared only
with attendees, but six months after the conference all presentations will be made available to the general public.

From our point of view

Six engineers from Allegro participated in QCon SF 2014. What can we say about the conference?
Due to its size, organization of such an event is a challenge. But hosts did a really good job – we did not observe
noticeable queues for registration, talks, lunches or other events.
Schedule posters and direction signs were placed everywhere — no possibility to get lost in the maze of corridors.

Speakers represented the most recognizable IT brands like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix, Groupon, PayPal
or eBay. This is a big advantage of QCon. You sit between worldwide leaders and not only passively listen
to their experience — you can feel you are the member of this community. Additionally conference location –
Silicon Valley, home of the most innovative companies — intensifies this impression.

Talks were varied. Some of them boring, too broad. On the other hand some were
too narrow and specialised to gain attention of broad audience. But fortunately, there were lot of extremely
interesting and inspiring presentations.

Talk voting system was simple but powerful — before leaving auditory, you were asked to put a card
(green, yellow or red, depending on your feeling about the presentation) into the bucket.
Last but not least, lunches and social events were remarkable not only because of fine food and drinks,
but mostly due to the opportunity to talk with colleagues from all over the world. Several discussions gave
us valuable experience exchange and some insight into how others solve problems that we are facing.

Talks

Due to the large number of talks it is not possible to resume them all in one article. But several of them were especially
interesting because they covered issues which Allegro is involved in.

Jafar Husain from Netflix talked about how they solved asynchronous JavaScript problems by thinking differently
about events, mainly investigating their similarities to collections. You can download slides
from Asynchronous programming at Netflix
presentation.

Sangeeta Naryanan (also from Netflix) in talk
How we learned to stop worrying and start deploying the Netflix API Service
showed her company’s road from 2-week release cycle with a lot of delays to on-demand releases with automatic
canary analysis, red-black deployment, easy feature rollback and full rollback. She also proved that not
only organization and its teams should be agile – architecture should be agile as well.

Michael Garvery from Zappos reminded Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design, proving that
less, but better is the best design strategy.

Steven Ihde and Karan Parikh showed LinkedIn’s road to transforming from a
monolith to microservices + REST.
They described their own open-source rest.li framework for building RESTful services and Deco library
providing URN resolution focusing on what data you want, not how you want it.

We and the world

Taking part in QCon convinced us that we at Allegro are doing a good job and have an opportunity not only to
use today’s top innovative solutions, but also to take a part in creating the future of IT.
During presentations we noticed that some big and identifiable companies have problems that we have
successfully solved some time ago. To be honest, we have also discovered or been reminded of some issues on our side
that should be improved. But wherever we are on this road to the ideal, the good thing is that we are on the same or
at least similar path as other innovative world-class companies.

Conclusion

QCon is really worth taking part in – after the conference, you are up-to-date with latest IT trends and see
what is used in the real world – and not only on paper.

To have the most valuable experience it is better to carefully choose talks in which you participate.
Catchy title is not a guarantee of avoiding a boring, monotonous presentation.

Social events are one of the strongest points of QCon. Think about one of famous IT brands and look around –
you will surely find people from that company and have opportunity to talk with them.
So if you want to know what happens in the world — this is place to be.

Software Development Lead at the team responsible for Allegro listing. Believes that developing software is not only coding and success depends also on many non-technical factors like understanding user needs.